Crop Circles

Crop Circles This weekend in the Travel section of our newspaper, Wiltshire, England was written up as a destination that would be interesting to visit. Wiltshire County in the United Kingdom is a destination you could visit to see the ancient sight of Stonehenge1 (~3000 BC) or crop circles. What’s a crop circle? Glad you asked. Crop circles are often immense designs that are created or appear in fields of grain that are flattened into a pattern. Some of these creations are admittedly man-­‐made by artists and some have no admitted source of creation. There are many theories about their creation ranging from alien activity to extreme weather. Crop circles have been found in many countries but 90% of the 10,000 crop circles that have been reported internationally have been in the countryside of England. Here are a few. May 5, 2011 Silbury Hill, Wiltshire
Woodborough Hill Crop Circle Formation
Wiltshire, UK August 2000 Windmill Hill Crop Circle 25th of May,
2009
On 29 July 1996, Windmill Hill near
Avebury, UK
A 780 ft (240 m) crop circle in the form of a
double (six-sided) triskelion composed of
409 circles. Milk Hill, England, 200 Chilbolton, Wiltshire Crop Circle, 2008
Bishop Cannings, Wiltshire - May 24, 2009 29 July 2007 Crop circle in Switzerland
27 June 2000 in Bishop Cannings,
Wiltshire, England
Letʼs try to draw one.
Use a compass and ruler and draw with a pencil that you can thoroughly erase. It helps to have a great eraser.
Weʼll try the design above on the right.
Draw a circle and divide it into eighths with four lines that pass across and through itʼs center at right and 45 degree
angles.
Connect every other circle and line intersection point to create two squares.
Open your compass to give the radius of our next circles the distance from one of the squareʼs vertex to the next
squareʼs vertex. Construct 8 circles each centered at one of the squareʼs verticies.
Create a circle with the center at the center of the 4 lines and a radius large enough to reach the outer point on
each of your small 8 circles.
Decide which regions in these various lines that you wish to emphasize. Draw more lines or circles if you like. You
can choose to shade them with highlighter or marker or retrace some of your lines with ink. To finish your
construction, erase your pencil lines.
This is mine.
Now choose a different image of a crop circle and try to devise instructions for your classmates on how to create it.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_circle
http://users.sch.gr/dkastani/abouten.html
1
photo of Stonehenge;
Brought to you by Yummymath.com